by Kyp Harness
“I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t purposely go around starting arguments with my family,” Mona states.
At this, Buzz grimaces and turns his head jerkily to gaze out the side window, aware that he has fucked up again, messed everything up, yet angry that this should be so, as if in accordance to an agreement he’d signed long ago he’s unable to experience real contrition; he can only react to the discomfort caused by his shame by getting angrier, more self-pitying. He wrestles in his heart with an impulse of almost violent hostility. In a moment, however, he is able to drag on his cigarette and stare into the night with wry, philosophical resignation.
“And that damn Elmer,” Buzz remarks, clicking his tongue and shaking his head. “I guess that stroke really took somethin’ out of ’im! He was lookin’ awful tonight! Awful!” Buzz exclaims, gazing into the slicing light before him beyond the windshield. “Jesus! I remember when that guy was like a giant! Strong as a horse—now seems like he can hardly sit up,” Buzz laments.
“Useta be he coulda drank anyone under the table—I watched him tonight and all he did all night long was nurse one beer! Shee—it!” Buzz curses scornfully, and as genuine as his angry distress is, he desires for one of these comments to gain some purchase on the icy cliff of Mona’s silence as they crackle down the sideroad in the night. As no response is forthcoming, he shrugs, returning to his posture of detached resignation, peering into the night.
In his studied nonchalance comes a song he hums almost inaudibly, almost unconsciously, coming to his lips naturally as they proceed to their home through darkness. He croons quietly:
On top of Old Smokey,
all covered in snow
I lost my true sweetheart
for courting too slow…
His voice rises as he gives himself to singing the song, his hand holding his cigarette upraised and gesturing, as if conducting his own accompanying orchestra as they pass through the shadows of the night-blackened countryside, the children sleeping softly in the back seat. He croons, half-singing, half-intoning:
For courting’s a pleasure
and parting’s a grief,
but a false-hearted lover
is worse than a thief.
David Crowe
Nobody likes David Crowe of the Crowe family living in a ramshackle house in a big, weedy field—David Crowe, who was born premature thus is anemic, thus is weak and tiny with pale, weak pipe-cleaner arms.
“That boy’s unhealthy,” remarks Buzz with a wince of distaste.
“Hush—he was born premature,” comes the cross reminder.
David Crowe the puny has dark, red freckles speckling and blotching his white clown face like drops of blood flecking and flying through the air, disturbing, like a spot of blood in an egg yolk. A grey, dull film covers his sizable teeth. He walks to school in his mother’s cast-off plaid slacks. Bullies don’t beat him, teachers don’t try him and animals shirk from him.
“Kitty kitty kitty,” David lisps, crawling underneath the house. The kitty is no more—he can’t understand why the cats keep running away.
The principal says he is very aware of David’s special educational needs. The teachers say, “Yes, David. Well, David…” When David is out of the room, they say, “We must take special care to integrate David into our activities, class,” and all the children laugh at David in his mother’s cast-off plaid slacks and run away giggling from him at lunchtime when he comes up with pieces of Oreo cookie imbedded in the grey film of his teeth.
Yet no hand is lifted to David—there’s an unspoken agreement on the playground—and at no time is he pushed backwards over the hunched form of a complicit chuckling deceiver, nor is his face washed red and stinging in the bitter painful snow, nor icicles broken over his head, nor is he slapped, pushed or pummelled. No, for what purpose is it to gather the featherless, baby starlings from their nest in the eavestrough—the tiny, pink embryo-like creatures—their beating, small hearts plainly visible pumping within their thin baby skin, to raise them up wriggling in the palm of your hand and dash them dead against the pavement? None.
Cruelty must be difficult to have its dignity, bullies forgo such small pleasures and conceive of greater intrigues to be worthy of the name at all (though when choosing teams for baseball, as a rule David is left standing all alone, the kids arguing about who’ll take him—nobody wants to lose). David Crowe sits on the sidelines, swings from the swings; if an outsider comes to the school, sneers at David Crowe, pushes at him, punches him, the children give the guy the subtle, unspoken, disapproving, lukewarm shoulder of the playground, the tribal No until he gets the idea. A whole invisible, protective force field encloses David; that’s it—he could be still in the womb—nobody really likes him, but nobody goes out of their way to hurt him either.
And sometimes you have to laugh when you see him running with a bouquet of weeds in the fall, when the tiny blow seeds blow off behind him like a million white, feathery parachutes whisking and wafting in the wind, like in a frightening dream, the thundering black chords of a piano reverberating through a long, dark tunnel, down at the distantly sighted mouth of which these soft, white, feathery seeds fall in the golden sunlight with the faint, quavering, lilting voice of a small child repeating a commonplace phrase over and over through soft, innocent lips, unknowing, all the more scary because it’s innocent.
None of this, however, stops David’s nose from bleeding frequently and profusely. It’s just a thing he has (as Toby Norton says, “We all have our things”); what causes it no one knows; he has special permission to leave class when it starts.
A great many of the teachers, you see, not only dislike David, they despise him (see him sitting off to the side at lunch eating his apple) and the reason they despise him is not because he is weak and puny, not because his parents are poor, not because he is ugly or his nose bleeds, not just because he is dislikeable and vaguely repellent, unnerving somehow, but rather and simply because he does not realize any of these things himself, not like the other runny-nosed, poor kids with vitamin deficiencies, skinny with white blotches on their faces and arms—rickets—their sallow faces downturned, murmuring apologetically.
David delightedly studies the bugs crawling on the grass and does not recognize his ostracization—pity cannot fall evenly upon him. Thus the vast warehouses of adult resentment must come avalanching down, bitter swipes of the tongue which fly but cannot wound him in his womb; none more so than those who would show him the greatest pity, who would pat his shoulder comfortingly or bring a fruit basket to his family at Christmas, scoring special points with God. Something in David’s unawareness of his own pitifulness aggravates them and annoys them.
David’s father weighs two hundred and fifty pounds and doesn’t work—something’s wrong with his back. He sits on the couch with lint in his bellybutton and his pants creeping down off his backside showing his underwear. His eyes are glazed over and yellow and he belches every ten minutes or so like he’s about to throw something up. His expression on his face all the time is like he’s just been rudely awakened from a deep sleep or is just about to fall into one. He stares at people and things with the long, unquestioning, unhurried, untroubled and faintly bored gaze of one who has absolutely no expectation of any kind whatever.
His wife is five feet tall and appears twenty years older than her age—she wears thick spectacles and large plastic earrings which look like orange buttons on her ears. They sit in their house while David is at school, an old farmhouse, most every room of which is cluttered and crammed with newspapers, vast stacks of thousands of yellowing newspapers leaning against the walls, bumping against the ceiling, more stacks out on the screened-in porch, stacks even in the bathroom leaning up against the toilet. They sit in the farmhouse before a black and white television set that never gets turned off. David’s mother pages through a paper, David’s father scratches himself idly, all the curta
ins are drawn, all is dim, faded-out greyness in the middle of the afternoon, but for a thin wedge of sunlight managing to get in through the corner of a window. It strains through an opening in the curtains and lays a rectangular silver beam across the floor—a leisurely gyrating universe of a million wafting specks of dust frolics in the beam.
On Parents’ Night, David’s mother and father come trudging down the hall of the school, him with his big cheeks bristling with an ugly rash of whiskers, her hobbling along beside him, dragging her left foot behind her (a broken ankle that never healed properly). David rushes ahead of her holding her hand—he wants to show her the picture he drew of the bugs. She’s wearing her special dress with pink flowers on it and she says, “Yes, yes, my dear boy, there’ll be time enough when we get there.” His father says nothing.
All the other kids and their parents whisper: “There’s that David Crowe and his parents”… “There’s the Crowes from the fifth line”… “Well did you ever see such a thing?”… “Really makes you wonder.” And in the strange, bright, white, fluorescent lights of the classroom, dazzling and vibrating with the weirdness of places unaccustomed to being inhabited in the night, they shuffle down the rows of the tiny school desks with the children’s colourful paintings crying out all around them.
The teacher talks of David’s progress to his parents. David’s mother nods and says, “Yes, yes,” after everything the teacher says, no matter what it is. David’s father merely stares at Mrs. Crowley, making her nervous. She keeps darting her eyes over to him and smiling at him after everything she says but his expression does not change, or rather it’s as if he has no expression—his head just hangs there in time, the heavy lids of his eyes blinking every so often. His hair sticks up from his head like he’s just been hatched out of an egg.
Ms. Crowley is upset in her mind because he won’t return her smile, yet there seems nothing hostile about the man’s demeanour: he just gives no indication he hears anything she’s saying, that’s all. Well, he’s just another dullard, she thinks, but still it seems to her that he’s looking through her and his vapid eyes are somehow examining the contents of her soul and finding them somewhat boring.
But no, it isn’t that at all, she thinks, and talks more of David’s spelling. Her unease is relieved somewhat when David comes up with his picture of the bugs, crawls across his mother’s lap and shows it to her, beaming with excitement—“Oh yes, my dear boy there it is, well that’s really something now isn’t it?” Though afterwards Mrs. Crowley again becomes somewhat nonplussed with Mr. Crowe when, as he leaves the room with his family after the interview, he lets a sharp, barking fart crack out from the voluminous folds of his baggy pants just as he disappears through the doorframe. She stands a moment staring at the empty door, her mind completely blank.
Later on in the teacher’s lounge, she’ll say, “Oh God, I finally met that Crowe boy’s mother and father, unbelievable, what a pair…”
“Oh yes,” says Mrs. Wertenbaker. “I had David last year, isn’t the mother something else? Can’t hardly weigh more than ninety pounds soaking wet.”
“Well, dears,” says Mr. Millgrim, reclining against a couch, “Jake was going to give me little David this year but I told him flat-out No. I mean why should I struggle a whole year with him holding back the rest of the class? It isn’t fair for the rest of the kids, in my opinion, I mean the kid should be placed in a special school where they can look after his needs and get on with it.”
“It was actually his father that I found the most disconcerting and weird,” says Mrs. Crowley, shivering a bit. “I mean the way the man just stands staring at you like a dumb animal without a thought in his head—and the way he looks like he just rolled out of bed and doesn’t give a damn about anything—gives me the creeps.”
“Mm-hm. Well he hasn’t turned his hand to a day’s honest labour in twenty years is what I heard—gets cheques from the government, you know,” Mrs. Wertenbaker says, her tiny eyes blinking behind her spectacles.
“Ladies, need I remind you,” says Mr. Millgrim, folding his hands behind his head, “that when you gaze upon a man such as Mr. Crowe that you are seeing before you the shining culmination of more than one hundred years of concentrated, indiscriminate inbreeding. The man should be stuffed and put into a museum as a classic specimen of the Hayseedis Moronicis, he of the slack jaw and the glassy eye. I mean, really, the reason he stares at you like a dumb, stupid animal is because he is a dumb stupid animal. I should find it quite surprising if the man even realized where he was tonight.”
“Oh, Bill,” says Mrs. Wertenbaker, shaking her head and chuckling.
“No, but really,” says Mrs. Crowley, “it really makes you wonder what it is that would make a man just go to seed like that.” She looks vaguely down at the carpet. “It’s a real shame. A pity, really.”
“Oh come on now, Joan,” says Mr. Millgrim, “People like that don’t go to seed, they’re born that way. For God’s sake, the whole family as far as I’m concerned collectively forms the supreme argument for the invention of retroactive abortion.” He shifts his thin body on the couch and loosens his necktie. “It’s not a matter of people letting themselves go to seed; it’s a case of being overdrawn at the gene pool. It’s a wonder people like that can even get themselves dressed in the morning. It’s a crime that people like that are allowed to reproduce in the first place!” (Mr. Millgrim once thought of running off to Paris and becoming a writer—a wife and two kids took care of that.)
“Oh, now Bill, you can’t say that,” says Mrs. Crowley.
“Look, Joan,” he says, straightening up and sitting on the couch, “I just told Jake straight out—I don’t want him in my class. Why should I spend my time teaching little David to tie his shoelaces when the rest of the kids are standing around waiting to learn how to conjugate verbs? Get him out of here and put him in a school for simpletons, I told him, or whatever the hell. Why should the other kids suffer because of him? I’m here as a teacher, not a babysitter.”
Just at that moment the door opens and a tall, beefy man in a blue uniform carrying a mop looks into the room: Mr. Morton, the custodian. “Okay, Pat,” says Mr. Millgrim to him. “We’ll be done here in ten minutes or so.”
Mr. Morton smiles slightly and retreats from the door. He leans his mop against the wall and walks off down the hall, trudging down the clean, bright, glistening linoleum floor of the school to the door leading down to the basement, opens it, and goes skulking down a flight of dark, dingy stairs to the boiler room to cool his heels for a while where the furnace and the ventilation system clanks and whirs and the pipes drip and tremble.
He seats himself heavily in a chair and turns on the radio to hear the last part of the hockey game, reaches over and pulls a forty-ouncer of rye out from behind the fusebox and takes a big swallow. “Ahhh,” says Mr. Morton. He flinches his shoulders and shakes his head in the dark bowels of the school.
He has a full head of grey, curly hair, dry like steel wool, and a big, red, mutton face, a broken nose he got when he boxed for a while. He grumbles a bit when he thinks of the teachers in the room above him—a bunch of phonies as far as he’s concerned, or so he often thinks after he’s had a couple of drinks. He was in the army once but it didn’t work out. Now he mops floors and does general maintenance.
“Fuckin’ kids,” he often mumbles under his breath when a whole chattering, running, screaming flock of them come racing in all over his nice clean floors, but he always feels ashamed of himself afterwards. He sits in his chair for a long time, staring sullenly at the blank cement wall before him, as if he’s expecting it to change into something else at any minute and he doesn’t want to miss it—his great body hunched over like a bear’s, the chair straining to contain it, his shoulders slack, little folds at the back of his thick, raw neck like the wrinkles in a tarpaulin.
He thinks of his wife’s hands—his wife at home, an invalid laid
up with a mysterious ailment, who hasn’t been out of the house hardly for fifteen years. He thinks of her thin quavering voice coming from the next room as if out from beneath a rock: “Pat, is the furnace turned up?” And the mere memory of the voice in his mind like the frail, last strands of a spider’s web clinging in the breeze after a storm is the same as hearing the voice itself, the weak trickling of it, at once fearful and persistent like a cat meowing senselessly, meek and at the same time steadfast, immutable, ridiculously insistent, pale, thin, high, faint, weak, thoroughly futile and endlessly determined, and it causes him again to burn, to rage, violently angry within.
He stares still at the cement wall, his face as if fashioned from iron, jaws clenched, welded together—enraged and also ashamed, his guts churning blackly and his dark eyes burning as if to scorch the wall; though his rage like an engine speeds into motion, the thick cloud of his shame gathers over it, invades it, sickens it, corrodes it. Ashamed before who and why? he asks himself, and Mad towards what and why? His heavy hands rest on the arms of the chair, the radio whispers unheard.
And there’s a cardboard box lying on the floor underneath the toolbox by the boiler and in the cardboard box beneath the manual for the ventilation system and a couple of old scrub brushes there’s a magazine and in the magazine there’s a picture of a naked woman with brown hair and twinkling blue eyes—and sometimes he picks up the magazine and stares down at the woman with the carefree, pleasing, complacent smile and the twinkling blue eyes and his heart stiffens into a murderous hatred—her white, shining teeth like a quick, jolting, merciless kick to the tenderest, most private parts of himself. He despises the woman with a sharp, clean and precise beam of hatred breaking through all the smoggy confusion of his chest—for he knows that she is hard, unimaginably hard.
And later, as his back arches on the rubber mat, as he presses himself up against this hardness and a vast, airless void opens in his mind, he wonders vaguely if it is not his wife that he hates, that what he really wishes to do is to pluck out that tenuous, straining, demanding innocence, those few remaining quavering, tenacious stands gripping mindlessly to the last shreds of life, and to crush them to death forever beneath his heel at long last.